Mike Linksvayer wrote:
On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 7:56 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
So at the very minimum, it would well serve us to know what the established standards are within CC-BY-SA, in particular focusing on the "BY" part.
As others have pointed out on this or nearby threads, attribution is highly medium specific.
That has been expressed as a preference for pragmatic reasons. I don't think anyone has in fact been talking about what the current practices are in this respect in differing media in the Creative Commons world as things stand, before WMF transitioning there. There may have been very thin mentions of other parts of WMF than wikipedia which have been Creative Commons from the git-go.
However, if what you say happens to in fact be correct (never mind if it has been previously covered in these threads or not), that would be quite significant, in particular in those jurisdictions where moral rights are defined in law. At least one legal "out" for the absolute "paternity right" to a work here in Finland, is the part that the form of attribution should accord with common methods of the field, and "good manners".
There is case-law on this. (KKO 1992:63 (Kalevala Koru)) was a decision that a jeweler did not have to include the name of the designer with the packaging of each individual piece of jewelery sold, as long as the designer was credited in a more general fashion, with the sales material etc. sent to the stores in relation to the works.
In that decision it was considered that the standard of that particular field was that the name of the artist who designed the jewelery was affixed to each piece of jewelery if the artist happened to have sufficient "name recognition", but not otherwise.
Personally, I think the guidelines Erik has mooted are very much in line with what CC-BY-SA enables and the wiki medium, but there's no better group than this (meaning Wikimedia projects collectively, if not just foundation-l) to improve on these if needed.
Equally personally, I think Erik's first suggestions were borderline legally defensible, in the sense that an argument could be framed around it, though not necessarily one that is a slam-dunk to prevail on, nor remotely a strongly persuasive one.
That said, my personal view on what is the "right thing" to do about attribution is far more nuanced than a merely legalistic one. But I won't revisit or develop it publicly at this point.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen